The present invention relates to a storage system, and in particular, to a logical partition method of the same.
In the information business sites such as a data center, it has been desired to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a storage system. For this purpose, a plurality of existing storage systems are replaced with a comprehensive, large-sized, single storage system to thereby achieve storage consolidation. In this description, a storage system indicates a system including a hard disk drive (to be referred to as an HDD hereinbelow) and a storage controller to control hard disk drives.
A storage logical partition technique is known as a technique to implement the storage consolidation. According to the technique, one storage system is subdivided into a plurality of Logical Partitions (LPAR) such that a plurality of individual storage systems seem to exist for users. As a result, the administrator of a storage system can concentrate on management of one physical storage system. This reduces the management cost as well as the physical area of the floor in which the system is installed, and resultantly lowers the total cost of ownership of the storage system.
There has been known a technique to provide a storage system having flexibility and scalability for a wide range of systems in configurations ranging from a small-sized configuration to a large-sized configuration using the same architecture of the high performance and the high reliability (reference is to be made to U.S. Pat. No. 6,647,461 and JP-A-2001-256003 corresponding thereto). According to the technique, a plurality of relatively small-sized storage systems (to be referred to as clusters hereinbelow) are connected to each other by an inter connection network to be operated as one system. A system including a plurality of clusters is called a storage system of cluster type or a cluster storage system.